capital punishment

COMMENTARY
Amir Beaudion Jr. appears in court on Jan. 28, 2020, at the Lincoln County Courthouse in Canton. Beaudion is charged with first degree murder in the death of Pasqalina Esen Badi. (Photo by Abigail Dollins, reused with permission from the Argus Leader)

Bizarre legal debate shows it’s time to talk about the death penalty

BY: - June 8, 2023

Read the next paragraph and see if it doesn’t seem like the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel in which the future is going horribly wrong. Or maybe it’s the plot of a social satire in which society has gone horribly, well, wrong. Lawyers are arguing over the future of a young man accused […]

Amir Beaudion Jr. appears in court on Jan. 28, 2020, at the Lincoln County Courthouse in Canton. Beaudion is charged with first degree murder in the death of Pasqalina Esen Badi. (Photo by Abigail Dollins, reused with permission from the Argus Leader)

Death penalty dispute could go to state Supreme Court

BY: - May 18, 2023

Prosecutors in Lincoln County want the state Supreme Court to decide if it’s constitutional to seek the death penalty for a man defense attorneys say is intellectually disabled. Second Circuit Presiding Judge Robin Houwman ruled in late April that the state’s standards for intellectual disability do not comport closely enough with medical standards to pass […]